Erin Wayman

Production Editor

Erin Wayman became Science News’ production editor in 2013 after a year of reporting on earth and environmental sciences for the magazine. A former primatologist-in-training, Erin decided to leave monkey-watching behind after a close run-in with angry peccaries in Ecuador. Once she completed her master’s degree in biological anthropology at the University of California, Davis, she switched careers and earned a master’s in science writing at Johns Hopkins University. Erin was previously an associate editor at EARTH and an assistant editor at Smithsonian magazine, where she blogged about human evolution. Her work has also appeared in New Scientist, Slate, ScienceNOW and Current Anthropology.

The dinosaurs were killed off some 65 million years ago after a colossal asteroid struck Earth. But what many people probably don’t know is how paleontologists came to that conclusion. "Mass Extinction: Life at the Brink" tells that story.

This is not a typical book about human evolution. There’s no chronology of fossil discoveries, no detailed description of hominid species or even an illustration of human family trees. In fact, the book is largely about what we don’t know about human evolution — and what we’ve gotten wrong.